Art: Graven Images

The answer will depend on what you think museums ought to do, but in the
area of art history it would be very hard to better the main summer
offering of Washington's National Gallery of Art, "Early Italian
Engravings." This is a recondite field, for Italian Renaissance
prints are rare, and great ones excruciatingly so. Simply because they
were meant to be widely distributedwhether as cheap ex-votos or as
artists' samplesmost of them have been lost.

The National Gallery's show, directed by a trio of experts (Konrad
Oberhuber,...